Online measures of looking and learning in infancy

Abstract

Infants in laboratory settings look longer at impossible than possible events, learn better about objects that behave surprisingly, and match people's utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms that reveal these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. But less is known about whether these canonical behaviors generalize in naturalistic environments. Here we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) looked longer at an online impossible support event (an object appearing to defy gravity) than a possible support event. These infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 2, we found that 15-montholds (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning online-they were better able to learn a label for a novel object when the object had just behaved unexpectedly. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that 16-month-olds (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance ("Yum!") showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, testing infants online is a feasible and promising approach for cognitive development research.

Toddlers’ social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

“…Research conducted via video conferencing has used this visual preference method to probe early social evaluations (in situations that do not involve false beliefs), and found that looking and reaching measures converge in infants and toddlers (Woo & Spelke, 2022) (as reviewed above). Other research has used visual preference methods to probe toddlers' understanding of emotion, replicating in-lab findings (Smith-Flores et al, 2022). Across these in-lab and video-conferencing-based experiments, participants have not looked longer to events in which agents engaged in prosocial actions.…”

Older infants' social learning behavior under uncertainty is modulated by the interaction of face and speech processing

“…For example, they could increase participant diversity, improve reproducibility and collaborative possibilities and reduce costs for researchers and participants. Moreover, recent infant studies have shown that lab studies can be replicated online (e.g., Chuey et al., 2021; Smith‐Flores et al., 2022). Hence, online testing can be a good option for infant research.…”

Learning to Recognize Unfamiliar Voices: An Online Study With 12- and 24-Month-Olds

“…There are multitude benefits of an online platform, including the ability to efficiently run participants, to recruit more diverse participants, and to continue research during laboratory shut-downs, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been some success in validating the use of these platforms, including findings that experimental conclusions derived via this platform are comparable to those of in-lab studies ( Scott et al, 2017 ; Smith-Flores et al 2022 ). Note, however, that effect sizes appear to be smaller for online studies, which may also explain some of our smaller effects.…”